Dollar Tanks as Unemployment Claims Skyrocketed to 26-Year Highs

The US dollar is tanking as jobless claims rise by the largest amount since November 1982, 26 years ago. As I have suspected, it is the 1980s all over again.

This confirms that the 533k drop in non-farm payrolls last month will not be the bottom in the labor market. When claims first hit 573k in January of 1982, non-farm payrolls dropped by -327k. It rebounded significantly the next month (-6k), but that was only precursor to another 10 consecutive months of job losses with non-farm payrolls revisiting the -300k levels in July (NFP in July 1982 was -343k). These jobless claims numbers reflect the massive layoffs that we have heard in the past weeks from companies like AT&T, Viacom and Sony. Continuing claims hit 4.429 million, the highest since 1982.

The widening of the trade deficit leads us to believe that GDP will take a big dive in the fourth quarter. The Treasury market is already pricing in the possibility of deflation and depression with yields in zero to negative territory for the first time since the Great Depression and incoming data supports that thesis.

The weekly jobless claims number will add pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by 75bp next Tuesday. Fed Fund futures are already pricing in a 100 percent chance of a 75bp rate cut from the Federal Reserve next week. This would take US rates to 0.25%, making the US dollar the lowest yielding currency in the developed world.

Even though volatility in the currency market has compressed since October and November, the Federal Reserve’s next interest rate decision is a major event risk because interest rates will be taken to historically low levels. Not only are the Fed expected to take interest rates to the lowest level this generation has ever seen but they have to figure out how to effectively signal their intentions of taking US interest rates to zero without completely spooking the markets. This will be a difficult balance to walk and one that could easily lead to an expansion in volatility in the currency market.

Kathy Lien is an Internationally Published Author and Chief Strategist of DailyFX.com, one of the world’s most popular online websites for currency research. Her trading books include the highly acclaimed, Day Trading the Currency Market: Technical and Fundamental Strategies to Profit form Market Swings (2005, Wiley); High Probability Trading Setups for the Currency Market E-Book (2006, Investopedia); and Millionaire Traders: How Everyday People Are Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game (2007, Wiley).
As Chief Currency Strategist at FXCM, Kathy is responsible for providing research and analysis for DailyFX, the research arm of FXCM. She also co-edits the BK Forex Advisor, an Investopedia.com Premium Service with Boris Schlossberg – one of the few investment advisory letters focusing strictly on the 2 Trillion/day FX market.

Kathy is also one of the authors of Investopedia’s Forex Education section and has written for Tradingmarkets.com, the Asia Times Online, Stocks & Commodities Magazine, MarketWatch, ActiveTrader Magazine, Currency Trader, Futures Magazine and SFO. She is frequently quoted by Bloomberg, Reuters, the Wall street Journal, and the International Herald Tribune and has appeared on CNN, CNBC, CBS and Bloomberg Radio. She has also hosted trader chats on EliteTrader, eSignal and FXStreet, sharing her expertise in both technical and fundamental analysis.